Minimally invasive surgical (MIS) procedures have become more common using robotic (e.g., telerobotic) surgical systems. Even still, a number of minimally invasive surgical procedures are performed using a plurality of surgical tools which are inserted through a plurality of openings in a patient's body. If openings into a patient's body are formed by cutting, they must be closed and allowed to heal. If the openings through which the surgical procedures are performed are reduced to a single opening, the time for recovery and risks of infection for a patient may be reduced. Moreover if the size of the one or more openings into the body can be reduced, it may be easier to close after the minimally invasive surgical procedure.
Additionally, the human body has a number of natural orifices through which surgical tools may be inserted. For example, the nostrils in the nose or the throat in the mouth of a patient may be used to perform some minimally invasive surgical procedures. The use of a natural orifice for some minimally invasive surgical procedures may permit a quicker recovery with little to no visible scarring.
Moreover, some surgical procedures must traverse long distances and/or open spaces within a human body to reach the surgical site from an opening. While endoscopes are often used to access such surgical sites, they are often limited in their ability to reach sites in an open space that lie substantially away from their direction of insertion. And while many endoscopes are capable of retroflexing one hundred eighty degrees, the short length of their articulated tips generally limits their maximum radius of curvature when so bent, which thus limits their reach within the abdomen. An exemplary surgical procedure is a trans-gastric cholysystectomy. For this surgical procedure, an endoscope may be inserted via the esophagus, through the wall of the stomach, and into the peritoneum far enough to reach into the lower abdomen and then, because of the limitations of its articulation, must follow the edges of the cavity around and back up to the gall bladder. Thus, an endoscope, capable of being articulated over long portions of its length to reach a surgical site that does not lie in the direction of initial insertion, is desired.